We all must breathe in order to live, but not many of us know how to really breathe.

It’s a bit of a conundrum. Breathing is an automatic bodily process, so most people naturally believe it should be left alone to take care of itself.

It seems counterintuitive and even ludicrous to think that something as simple as breathing could, in fact, dramatically change your day-to-day experience.

But, honestly, it can.

Overcoming Anxiety and Negative Thoughts

I’m someone who occasionally suffers from bouts of anxiety, irrational guilt, and other forms of self-defeating thoughts. I think of these thought processes as psychological trapdoors — they so often spring from nowhere and lead to dark spaces.

If there’s one thing I’ve realized from living inside my mind, it’s that these psychological trapdoors lead to nothing but crippling insecurity and needless suffering.

See, for a long time, I subconsciously believed what many people believe: that worrying a lot about something can actually help the situation. It seems crazy, but most of us engage in this type of activity. We try to think of everything that could go wrong, or we try to analyze and rationalize past actions or things we perceive to be negative in our lives to justify who we are to ourselves.

It’s possible to spend the majority of your life — years upon years — thinking this way. Doing so, though, is placing yourself in a very literal form of hell on Earth. Over-analyzing and self-criticizing are two enormous burdens. It’s hard to notice how much they weigh you down until you’re able to overcome them, or at least get a handle on them.

The Conscious Breathing Method

What has worked wonders for me in overcoming anxiety and other negative thoughts is learning to be aware of my mind. I actively notice when the first signs of these trains of thought begin to creep in. We all have trigger thoughts — a first thought that leads to a lot of worrying or analyzing — that send our minds on a well-worn route to no-man’s land. I’ve learned mine and recognize them. Try to do the same.

One thing to realize is that these poisonous trains of thought are just begging to be indulged. Unconsciously, we assume that it won’t hurt to analyze the upcoming speech or wonder about the lost love for a little while. However, devoting just a little thought to something gives it much more psychic energy. The more you focus on something, the more it takes root in the mind. Pretty soon, a sapling becomes a Sequoia and you’ve lost your ability to perceive the situation clearly.

So, what I’ve been able to learn to do is to notice as soon as a self-defeating thought-seed enters my mind, and squash it out before it’s able to take hold. Sometimes, I do this by diverting my thoughts to something else, but more often, I simply focus on my breathing.

So, the process looks something like this:

1) Negative trigger idea enters mind.
2) I choose not to devote further thought to it.
3) I choose instead to focus on my breathing.

After focusing on my breathing for, say, 20-30 seconds, the thoughts tend to recede and I can move on with my day, feeling fine.

How to Breathe Consciously

Breathing consciously is surprisingly easy to learn, but it takes practice to be able to do it well. In essence, it means concentrating on nothing but the breath entering and exiting your body.

The mind will fight against this. It wants to think of the thousands of other things we think about every day, so you’ll notice other thoughts creeping in. Just try to push them away — let them fade, dissipate — and return to your breathing.

Here are a few tips:

1) Breathe through your nose – This is the standard in Buddhism and many other schools of meditation.

2) Focus on the outer edges of your nostrils – Also a standard suggestion. Focus on the air moving through the nostrils and filling the body. Focus on it rushing out.

3) Breathe deeply and slowly – When breathing is automatic, our breath is shallow. When breathing deeply and slowly, the effect is more relaxing. This also gives you more to focus on.

4) Breathe from the diaphragm, not the upper chest – Your diaphragm is a muscle located between your chest cavity and stomach cavity. When breathing from the diaphragm, the stomach expands and contracts. This is typically recommended in deep breathing exercises.

5) Imagine something complimentary – I usually imagine positive energy flowing into me when I breathe in, and negative energy leaving when I breathe out. I also sometimes picture an ocean rising when I inhale and falling when I exhale. This is calming for me and may work for you too.

6) Close your eyes and be still – This helps me block everything else out more easily.

A Word on Mindfulness

Another stellar benefit of conscious breathing is that it allows you to be more mindful. Mindfulness is essentially a type of meditation that can be done at any time in everyday life. It entails being wholly and completely present in the here and now, the present moment.

A Facebook friend of mine posted this poignant quote on mindfulness a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know who wrote it, but I think it’s an apt description:

“As to what mindfulness is like, as is often said, there can be no direct description of it, but it can be analogized.

Do you remember what it was like when you first traveled to a foreign country? Say it was Rome. Every experience on that trip felt like Rome itself. The airport itself was Rome saying welcome. Every interaction, from the cafe waiter, to the hotel desk clerk, to the museum guides, they were all expressions of Rome. The smell of traffic exhaust was uniquely Roman, as was the trash on the ground, the humidity after the rainstorm. All of these things were as Roman as the Coliseum. Rome was not a place, not a city, but a living experience. This is what happens when you see the world without the veil of identity and thoughts, and you are just a wanderer with no role to play.

When you go back home, the airport is just a bore. Traffic exhaust just smells like exhaust. Trash is an eyesore. Humidity is just unpleasant. The cab driver is rude. Even the landmarks are unremarkable. This is what happens when you see the world through your identity, the role you are obliged to play.”

Put simply, mindfulness means forgetting yourself in the experience of the present moment. One way to be in the present is to focus on your breathing. Another is to focus on your bodily sensations, the various background noises happening all the time, the smell of the air, the caress of the wind, the shape of the clouds.

Like conscious breathing, mindfulness take practice, but I can’t express the value it has brought to my life. Many times every day, I remind myself to snap out of my reverie of thought and just be here. It’s wonderful. For more on mindfulness, check out this article I wrote. Regular sitting meditation also makes it much easier to breathe consciously and be mindful, so you may want to read my guide to meditation.

Let Your Breath be Your Anchor

It’s comforting and empowering to know that your breath is always there for you. Like a mother to her child, it will not forsake you. For me, my breathing has truly become a haven, an oasis to which I can always retreat when thought-demons infiltrate my mental castle.

I hope it can become the same for you. I encourage you to adopt it as a habit. Start very small, and practice at it little by little. Best wishes to you all, and I’ll leave you with a few sage words from a fellow writer and blogger, Leo Babauta, who once taught me about breathing:

“Breathe.

If you feel overwhelmed, breathe. It will calm you and release the tensions.

If you are worried about something coming up, or caught up in something that already happened, breathe. It will bring you back to the present.

If you are moving too fast, breathe. It will remind you to slow down, and enjoy life more.

Breathe, and enjoy each moment of this life. They’re too fleeting and few to waste.”

Source: www.inspireamaze.com

The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is one of the most fascinating, revolutionary, and useful research initiatives being carried out in the world today. Its potential to improve the quality of our life is infinite, with the scientific method being its only hindrance – to prove beyond reasonable doubt that we are all one.

GCP is the brainchild of Dr. Roger D. Nelson, a professor at Princeton University who holds a PhD in Experimental Cognitive Psychology. He has the distinction of being the first scientist to find a way of measuring with mathematical models what ancient spiritual traditions have always claimed: we are all one. Nelson has devised a way to measure the field of global consciousness, a field that unites us, and in doing so has revealed that we are the cells of a single body. That body is humanity.

The scientific name given to this phenomenon is Electrogaiagram (EGG). It is measured through a network of one hundred computers in many different parts of the world that operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, emitting ones and zeros in a predefined random pattern.

The data released from each of these computers are sent to a supercomputer at the University of Princeton for analysis. What this giant computer is looking for are anomalies in the behavior of the network.

A data stream is signified as an anomaly if its behavior cannot be explained and yet it is a statistically significant diversion from the normal pattern. The fact is that each computer in the network is programmed to exhibit a series of 0s and 1s.

Therefore, it can’t make an error on its own unless something electrically significant, like a tangible thought, interacts with its processing capability. This results in glitches. So in a perfect scenario there shouldn’t be any of them, right? Turns out that these anomalies exist and become very marked when major events of our times are unfolding. What such events have in common is that they focus the attention of millions of people to a single point, a common focus such as meditation.

The investigators at GCP associate these anomalies to the effect of the human mind on matter beyond the frontiers of its normal sphere of influence. It might be that our brains are communicating on invisible pathways all the time. But this electrical activity becomes more profound when the collective consciousness of millions of people is focused on a single event. This results in a field of consciousness that is strong enough to affect artificial intelligence within its vicinity.

However, what is even more baffling is that these anomalies are mostly predictive, often happening hours before the original event takes place. Researchers found one such significant irregularity 4 hours prior to the September 11 attacks, where the mathematical analysis of the data showed that the New York computer broke the 1 to 0 ratio of 50:50 to 1:35!

Similar incongruities were observed prior to the terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, along with the tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia and the election of President Obama. So, does this mean that our collective, global consciousness knows of a major event before our individual consciousness does?

There still might be a long time before these findings are scientifically corroborated. But this research is very promising in the aspect that, once proven, could be instrumental in breaking down the barriers that divide us humans.

If we are but cells in one single body then we would rid all evil doings because we would know that anything that affects one cell is bound to affect the whole body on some scale.

God Particles from the Galactic Core

V. Susan Ferguson, Contributor
Waking Times

Is the Galactic Center in our Milky Way sending our beloved Earth the healing energies she requires to realign in harmony with Cosmic Law? Chandra X-ray Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama report in Astronomy magazine that the center heart of our galaxy, known as Sagittarius A* has recently shown a ten-fold increase in its flaring:

A new study reveals that Sgr A* has been producing one bright X-ray flare about every 10 days. However, within the past year, there has been a ten-fold increase in the rate of bright flares from Sgr A*, at about one every day. This increase happened soon after the close approach to Sgr A* by a mysterious object called G2. [Source]

What our eyes may perceive as empty sky space is more a crowded densely packed shooting gallery for trillions of highly charged energetic wave particles as rays — a pulsating ocean in the vastness of interplanetary space. Some of us can ‘see’ these energies in the sky above us. The emerging science of space physics reveals the ubiquitous complexities of Cosmic Rays, which are of two types: the Galactic Cosmic Rays, GCRs high energy particles originating outside the solar system, and Solar Energetic Particles, SEPs emitted by the Sun. Galactic Cosmic Rays may originate within or outside the galaxy, thus the energies that come into our heliosphere are from our Sun, the Heart of the Milky Way and beyond.

There are highly complex interactions of particles in the intersteller medium of interplanetary space that travel from the Galactic Core, the Sun and planets to nourish our Earth. Our Earth’s magnetosphere needs these energies, a sort of metaphorical ‘milk’ from the various parts of the Milky Way to feed her magnetically, keep her vital and alive.

“The magnetospheric activity and dynamics require power that is extracted in the interaction between the magnetosphere and the solar wind.” – Dynamic Magnetosphere

This ‘milk’ is comparable to semen for our planet, the electric universe twin polarities that enliven our heliosphere via the various Galactic Cosmic Rays, GCRs the high energy background population incident upon the heliosphere uniformly and isotropically — while in the inner heliosphere, the galactic cosmic radiation is modulated by solar activity; Solar Energetic Particles, SEPs accelerated in solar flares; Energetic Storm Particles, ESPs particles accelerated at interplanetary shocks; and Corotating Interaction Regions, CIRs. [Space Physics/MB Kallenrode].

Universal Cosmic God-Laws

Any true science would reflect the Cosmic Laws that bring the universe into being — God-Laws. There would naturally be a correlation between metaphysical laws that are the eternal substratum of the manifested universe and the physics of the external manifested realms. Any imbalance would inevitably demand a return to harmony. Theoretically, if you know the basic God-Laws, then the various applications of other sciences will fit harmoniously into them. Knowing the one substratum leads you to understand them all, at least in principle.

The metaphysical principles that govern our own inner reality, the mechanics of enlightenment, our spirit or astral body with its seven chakras, the three gunas, the mysteries of five-sense perception, and our eternal interconnectedness to the All, will resonate in harmony with the physical sciences to the degree that these sciences express the Universal Cosmic order, the Laws of God. Any true real science must be founded upon and in complete harmony with primordial metaphysics. Linear thinking is a limitation we need to leave for a more complete inclusive holistic thinking in harmony with Universal Cosmic God-Laws.

Infinitesimal Whirls in the Woven Universe

Bruce Cathie quotes the genius inventor Nicola Tesla from an unpublished article:

“Long ago he (man) recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance of a tenuity [a rarified state] beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or Luminiferous Ether, which is acted upon by the life givingprana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena. The primary substance, thrown into Infinitesimal Whirls of prodigious velocity, becomes gross matter; the Force subsiding, the motion ceases and matter disappears, reverting to the primary substance.”

This statement from Tesla sounds as if it has been taken verbatim from a Sanskrit text! Cathie himself says, “Matter is nothing more than a complex matrix of wave-forms locked together by harmonic resonance.” [‘The Energy Grid’]

Rene Guenon has written extensively about the disconnect in modern times between the primordial metaphysical principles and what he terms the profane sciences: “…most of these sciences, even insofar as they still correspond to some reality, represent no more than simple debased residues of some of the ancient traditional sciences.”

Guenon explains that numbers have lost their real meaning. He states that our contemporaries are ignorant of what number truly is and understand number only its strictly quantitative sense, reducing number to “calculation in the narrowest sense of the word, that is, to a mere collection of more or less artificial procedures, which are in short only valuable with respect to practical applications to which they give rise.” According to Guenon, only geometric form can be legitimately considered to constitute the true body of a number. This is in “accordance with the fact that all ’embodiment’ necessarily implies a ‘spatialization’.” The science that is exclusively quantitative distances itself further and further from reality.

The Inter-Connected Substratum

The Universal Cosmic God-Laws are the substratum of the manifested realms. In other words, the appearance of the solidity of material forms in varying densities rests upon a metaphysics that reflect the eternal harmonics found in primordial God-Laws. This explains why so many theoretical sciences can be seen in the Rig Veda, and also why there are so many varying translations. In my rendering of the Rig Veda, I am able to discern the mechanics of electricity, electromagnetism, plasma physics, and magnetic fusion technology — right along with the inner enlightening esoteric ancient Wisdom-Knowledge in these ancient hymns because of eternal harmonic resonant correspondences between the inner ‘invisible to the five senses’ realms and external apparent manifestations.

Fierce Winds coming from the Heart of our Galaxy

Sagittarius A* is a very compact, highly luminous unresolved radio source that lies at the exact center of our Milky Way Galaxy. “Astronomers are convinced that Sagittarius A* is a single body. It is estimated to be about a million times as massive as the Sun, making it the most massive celestial object in the Galaxy.” A fierce wind of cosmic ray electrons and protons is said to generated by a relatively small region in Sagittarius A*. These winds are rushing outward at speeds close to the speed of light and their “particles emit electromagnetic radiation ranging from low frequency radio emission to high energy gamma ray emission.” [Dr. Paul LaViolette]

LaViolette questions the theory of a black hole being at the center of our galaxy and reports that “all evidence to date suggests that gas is not being drawn toward the Galactic center but is being pushed away, outward. He says that the ancients did not see the Heart of our galaxy as a region of annihilation, but “as one of matter and energy creation, a cosmic wellspring giving birth to all the matter in the Galaxy.”

The World is Spirit Clothed in Sound